Monday, September 06, 2010

Council of Nicaea in 325 AD – Excellent Question!

Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Liberal Skeptics repeat the same misunderstandings on the council of Nicaea in 325. Or are they deliberately lying?

Regarding the Trinity and Deity of Christ, the council of Nicaea, and church history

Pastor Joseph:
“Those who hate the doctrine of the Trinity like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims and so many others, claim that the Trinity is an invention, of Nicaea, and maybe Constantine, and it’s a political thing, and none of the church fathers before 325 ever believed in the Trinity” can you address this?,. . . “

Dr. James White:
“Only real radical people would even begin to make that kind of an assertion, because it is so easy to demonstrate the existence of the belief in the full Deity of Christ from their writings before the Council of Nicaea . . .

“Why does anyone think that the men who gathered at the council of Nicaea in 325 AD, almost every single one of them, who had just gone through the most severe period of persecution by the Roman Empire ever brought against the Christian church; - remember that persecution extended to 313 AD - so only 12 years earlier than Nicaea (325), the Roman Empire was engaged in the worst level of persecution of Christians, from 260-313 AD – was the worst period; there was not any other period of Empire –wide persecution as bad as that period; - so many of the men that gathered at Nicaea carried the scars on their bodies from the sufferings that they had undergone, because they refused to deny their testimony of Jesus Christ. Why would anyone think that those kinds of men who had gone through so much, would roll over and accept some kind of new teaching and new god and new deity on the authority of the very state that had been persecuting them for so long? How does that make one wit of sense? I have never understood that. That is why that argument has never carried any historical weight to any serious minded person.” Dr. James White

4 comments:

Should be in bed, have yet another busy day scheduled for tomorrow, but wanted to check in on the goings on in cyberspace before retiring; in your opening post you quoted the following:

==Dr. James White:“Only real radical people would even begin to make that kind of an assertion, because it is so easy to demonstrate the existence of the belief in the full Deity of Christ from their writings before the Council of Nicaea . ..==

Me: James is not being accurate here at all; pretty much every Patristic scholar of any reputation acknowledges THE FACT that all of the pre-Nicene Fathers were subordinationsists (i.e affirmed the deity of Christ, but not the FULL deity of Christ). So, it sure seems to this simple beachbum that James has got it wrong yet once again, and that James is the real "radical".

And Origen and Ireneaus (2 of the main examples you use) still believed in the Trinity, even though the way they explain the relationship between the Father and the Son is different than the later creeds; they are still examples of pre-Nicaean belief in the Deity of Christ and the Trinity, and therefore, even their "subordiantionism" (there are different levels and understanding of that) does not give comfort to Muslims or Jehovah's witnesses or skeptics on the point that Dr. White is making. It still doesn't follow that the Trinity was something new and "a new god, new teaching, new deity"; as Ignatius shows us very clearly.

"He that has ever so little examined the citations of writers cannot doubt how little credit the quotations deserve when the originals are wanting"

xx

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